Witness K is a former officer of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) who exposed Australia’s bugging of the East Timorese cabinet offices during oil and gas revenue negotiations between the two countries. His lawyer, Bernard Collaery, has said Australian intelligence officers have no independent inspector general to whom they can report misconduct — unlike in the United States.[1] Collaery says the bugging had nothing to do with national security: it took place during a revenue dispute over a shared oil and gas field, and Alexander Downer, the Foreign Minister who directed the operation, later went to work for Woodside Petroleum, one of the companies with a commercial interest in the outcome.[2] Collaery has alleged that former ASIS director David Irvine personally ordered Witness K to conduct the bugging in Dili, and that Irvine — who subsequently became ASIO’s director general — was the one who obtained the warrant later used to raid Collaery and Witness K.[3]
Reporting the crime was itself a crime
Collaery says that under Australian law, reporting a crime as an intelligence officer is itself a crime, which meant a domestic complaint was not a safe option. Instead, he filed a confidential international arbitration on Witness K’s behalf at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, which under its rules grants participants immunity from prosecution.[4]
The raids
While Collaery was in The Hague, ASIO raided both his home and office and Witness K’s home, seizing documents and electronics room by room — a process Collaery says paralleled the FBI’s raid on John Kiriakou.[5] Attorney General George Brandis issued a personal warrant under a post-9/11 provision of the ASIO Act, rather than seeking a judicial warrant, to authorize the raids — doing so, per Collaery, at the request of the same official who had originally instructed Witness K to carry out the bugging.[6] During the raids, technical teams searched the roof cavities of both Collaery’s and Witness K’s homes, which Collaery took as evidence the properties had already been secretly bugged prior to the raid.[7]
International Court of Justice ruling
The International Court of Justice ruled 15–1 — the sole dissent cast by the Australian-appointed judge — that Australia had to seal, and not read, the documents seized from Collaery’s law office and home.[8]
An Australian parallel: David McBride
John Kiriakou has separately named Australian military whistleblower David McBride — prosecuted for exposing alleged war crimes — as another case in the same pattern of Australian and British hostility to whistleblowers. Kiriakou calls McBride “a national hero” and a personal friend, and says he had convinced himself cooler heads would prevail in McBride’s prosecution, given the case’s overwhelming public sympathy; McBride was nonetheless imprisoned.[9]